The agency turned its database on childhood vaccines — which had been developed largely at taxpayer expense — over to a private agency, America's Health Insurance Plans, ensuring that it could not be used for additional research.

It also instructed the Institute of Medicine, an advisory organization that is part of the National Academy of Sciences, to produce a study debunking the link between thimerosal and brain disorders.

The CDC "wants us to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe," Dr. Marie McCormick, who chaired the IOM's Immunization Safety Review Committee, told her fellow researchers when they first met in January 2001.

"We are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect" of thimerosal exposure." ”

When a study revealed that mercury in childhood vaccines may have caused autism in thousands of kids, the government rushed to conceal the data — and to prevent parents from suing drug companies for their role in the epidemic.

In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Ga.

Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy.

The agency had issued no public announcement of the session — only private invitations to 52 attendees.

There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva, and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur.

All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly "embargoed."

There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left.

Even for scientists and doctors accustomed to confronting issues of life and death, the findings were frightening

The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children.

According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines — thimerosal — appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children.

"I was actually stunned by what I saw," Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism.

Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants — in one case, within hours of birth — the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children.

Even for scientists and doctors accustomed to confronting issues of life and death, the findings were frightening.

Instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data

"You can play with this all you want," Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the group.

The results "are statistically significant."

Dr. Richard Johnston, an immunologist and pediatrician from the University of Colorado whose grandson had been born early on the morning of the meeting's first day, was even more alarmed.

"My gut feeling?" he said.

"Forgive this personal comment — I do not want my grandson to get a thimerosal-containing vaccine until we know better what is going on."

But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data.

According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations about thimerosal would affect the vaccine industry's bottom line.

"We are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits," said Dr. Robert Brent, a pediatrician at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Delaware.

"This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country."

US causedAfghanistanchildren refugees

US caused Afghan refugee children play at their home in a destroyed building where many refugees live, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, June 20, 2007.

A U.N. report released Tuesday said that, at the end of 2006, the world had 9.9 million refugees, a 14 percent increase over the 8.7 million refugees recorded in 2005.

Last year was one of the worst on record for refugees and the crisis is deepening in 2007 because of conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan's Darfur region, the United Nation's refugee chief said.

Picture: AP/Farzana Wahidy

Sudanese children dance during celebrations to mark 'World Refugee Day' at the UN-run Way Station outside the southern capital Juba, June 20, 2007.

Last year was one of the worst on record for refugees and the crisis is deepening in 2007 because of conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan's Darfur region, the United Nation's refugee chief said.

Government far more adept at handling spin than at protecting children's health

Dr. Bob Chen, head of vaccine safety for the CDC, expressed relief that "given the sensitivity of the information, we have been able to keep it out of the hands of, let's say, less responsible hands."

Dr. John Clements, vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization, declared flatly that the study "should not have been done at all" and warned that the results "will be taken by others and will be used in ways beyond the control of this group. The research results have to be handled."

In fact, the government has proved to be far more adept at handling the damage than at protecting children's health.

The CDC paid the Institute of Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers to "rule out" the chemical's link to autism.

It withheld Verstraeten's findings, even though they had been slated for immediate publication, and told other scientists that his original data had been "lost" and could not be replicated.

Database off-limits to researchers

And to thwart the Freedom of Information Act, it handed its giant database of vaccine records over to a private company, declaring it off-limits to researchers.

By the time Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal and autism.

Vaccine manufacturers had already begun to phase thimerosal out of injections given to American infants — but they continued to sell off their mercury-based supplies of vaccines until last year.

Buying up the tainted vaccines for export to developing countries and allowing drug companies to continue using the preservative in some American vaccines

The CDC and FDA gave them a hand, buying up the tainted vaccines for export to developing countries and allowing drug companies to continue using the preservative in some American vaccines — including several pediatric flu shots as well as tetanus boosters routinely given to 11-year-olds.

The drug companies are also getting help from powerful lawmakers in Washington.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has received $873,000 in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has been working to immunize vaccine makers from liability in 4,200 lawsuits that have been filed by the parents of injured children.

Frist has tried to seal all of the government's vaccine-related documents

On five separate occasions, Frist has tried to seal all of the government's vaccine-related documents — including the Simpsonwood transcripts — and shield Eli Lilly, the developer of thimerosal, from subpoenas.

In 2002, the day after Frist quietly slipped a rider known as the "Eli Lilly Protection Act" into a homeland security bill, the company contributed $10,000 to his campaign and bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism.

Included in anti-terrorism bill provision to deny compensation to children suffering from vaccine-related brain disorders

Congress repealed the measure in 2003 — but earlier this year, Frist slipped another provision into an anti-terrorism bill that would deny compensation to children suffering from vaccine-related brain disorders.

"The lawsuits are of such magnitude that they could put vaccine producers out of business and limit our capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists," says Andy Olsen, a legislative assistant to Frist.

Even many conservatives are shocked by the government's effort to cover up the dangers of thimerosal.

Rep. Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana, oversaw a three-year investigation of thimerosal after his grandson was diagnosed with autism.

"Thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is directly related to the autism epidemic," his House Government Reform Committee concluded in its final report.

"This epidemic in all probability may have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the switch regarding a lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal, a known neurotoxin."

Institutional arrogance, power and greed — US Government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide risks of thimerosal from public

The FDA and other public-health agencies failed to act, the committee added, out of "institutional malfeasance for self protection" and "misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry."

The story of how government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public is a chilling case study of institutional arrogance, power and greed.

I was drawn into the controversy only reluctantly.

As an attorney and environmentalist who has spent years working on issues of mercury toxicity, I frequently met mothers of autistic children who were absolutely convinced that their kids had been injured by vaccines.

Privately, I was skeptical.

I doubted that autism could be blamed on a single source, and I certainly understood the government's need to reassure parents that vaccinations are safe; the eradication of deadly childhood diseases depends on it.

I tended to agree with skeptics like Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, who criticized his colleagues on the House Government Reform Committee for leaping to conclusions about autism and vaccinations.

"Why should we scare people about immunization," Waxman pointed out at one hearing, "until we know the facts?"

It was only after reading the Simpsonwood transcripts, studying the leading scientific research and talking with many of the nation's preeminent authorities on mercury that I became convinced that the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real.

Five of my own children are members of the Thimerosal Generation — those born between 1989 and 2003 — who received heavy doses of mercury from vaccines.

Overwhelmed with children who have symptoms of neurological or immune-system damage — Something very, very wrong is happening to our children

"The elementary grades are overwhelmed with children who have symptoms of neurological or immune-system damage," Patti White, a school nurse, told the House Government Reform Committee in 1999.

"Vaccines are supposed to be making us healthier.

However, in 25 years of nursing I have never seen so many damaged, sick kids.

Something very, very wrong is happening to our children."

More than 500,000 kids currently suffer from autism, and pediatricians diagnose more than 40,000 new cases every year. The disease was unknown until 1943, when it was identified and diagnosed among 11 children born in the months after thimerosal was first added to baby vaccines in 1931.

Some skeptics dispute that the rise in autism is caused by thimerosal-tainted vaccinations.

They argue that the increase is a result of better diagnosis — a theory that seems questionable at best, given that most of the new cases of autism are clustered within a single generation of children.

"If the epidemic is truly an artifact of poor diagnosis," scoffs Dr. Boyd Haley, one of the world's authorities on mercury toxicity, "then where are all the 20-year-old autistics?"

Other researchers point out that Americans are exposed to a greater cumulative "load" of mercury than ever before, from contaminated fish to dental fillings, and suggest that thimerosal in vaccines may be only part of a much larger problem.

It's a concern that certainly deserves far more attention than it has received — but it overlooks the fact that the mercury concentrations in vaccines dwarf other sources of exposure to our children.

Lengths taken to ignore and cover up evidence against thimerosal

What is most striking is the lengths to which many of the leading detectives have gone to ignore — and cover up — the evidence against thimerosal.

From the very beginning, the scientific case against the mercury additive has been overwhelming.

The preservative, which is used to stem fungi and bacterial growth in vaccines, contains ethylmercury, a potent neurotoxin.

Mercury accumulates in brain after injections

Truckloads of studies have shown that mercury tends to accumulate in the brains of primates and other animals after they are injected with vaccines — and that the developing brains of infants are particularly susceptible.

In 1977, a Russian study found that adults exposed to much lower concentrations of ethylmercury than those given to American children still suffered brain damage years later.

Russia banned thimerosal from children's vaccines 20 years ago, and Denmark, Austria, Japan, Great Britain and all the Scandinavian countries have since followed suit.

"You couldn't even construct a study that shows thimerosal is safe," says Haley, who heads the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky.

"It's just too darn toxic.

If you inject thimerosal into an animal, its brain will sicken.

If you apply it to living tissue, the cells die.

If you put it in a petri dish, the culture dies.

Knowing these things, it would be shocking if one could inject it into an infant without causing damage."

Internal documents reveal that Eli Lilly, which first developed thimerosal, knew from the start that its product could cause damage — and even death — in both animals and humans.

In 1930, the company tested thimerosal by administering it to 22 patients with terminal meningitis, all of whom died within weeks of being injected — a fact Lilly didn't bother to report in its study declaring thimerosal safe.

In 1935, researchers at another vaccine manufacturer, Pittman-Moore, warned Lilly that its claims about thimerosal's safety "did not check with ours."

Half the dogs Pittman injected with thimerosal-based vaccines became sick, leading researchers there to declare the preservative "unsatisfactory as a serum intended for use on dogs."

In the decades that followed, the evidence against thimerosal continued to mount.

During the Second World War, when the Department of Defense used the preservative in vaccines on soldiers, it required Lilly to label it "poison."

In 1967, a study in Applied Microbiology found that thimerosal killed mice when added to injected vaccines.

Four years later, Lilly's own studies discerned that thimerosal was "toxic to tissue cells" in concentrations as low as one part per million — 100 times weaker than the concentration in a typical vaccine.

Even so, the company continued to promote thimerosal as "nontoxic" and also incorporated it into topical disinfectants.

In 1977, 10 babies at a Toronto hospital died when an antiseptic preserved with thimerosal was dabbed onto their umbilical cords.

In 1982, the FDA proposed a ban on over-the-counter products that contained thimerosal, and in 1991 the agency considered banning it from animal vaccines.

But tragically, that same year, the CDC recommended that infants be injected with a series of mercury-laced vaccines.

Newborns would be vaccinated for hepatitis B within 24 hours of birth, and 2-month-old infants would be immunized for haemophilus influenzae B and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.

The same year that the CDC approved the new vaccines, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one of the fathers of Merck's vaccine programs, warned the company that 6-month-olds who were administered the shots would suffer dangerous exposure to mercury.

He recommended that thimerosal be discontinued, "especially when used on infants and children," noting that the industry knew of nontoxic alternatives.

"The best way to go," he added, "is to switch to dispensing the actual vaccines without adding preservatives."

For Merck and other drug companies, however, the obstacle was money.

Thimerosal enables the pharmaceutical industry to package vaccines in vials that contain multiple doses, which require additional protection because they are more easily contaminated by multiple needle entries.

The larger vials cost half as much to produce as smaller, single-dose vials, making it cheaper for international agencies to distribute them to impoverished regions at risk of epidemics.

Faced with cost considerations Merck ignored warnings — US Government public servants continued to push more and more thimerosal-based vaccines for children

Faced with this "cost consideration," Merck ignored Hilleman's warnings, and government officials continued to push more and more thimerosal-based vaccines for children.

Before 1989, American preschoolers received only three vaccinations — for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella.

A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total of 22 immunizations by the time they reached first grade.

As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among children exploded.

During the 1990s, 40 million children were injected with thimerosal-based vaccines, receiving unprecedented levels of mercury during a period critical for brain development.

Despite the well-documented dangers of thimerosal, it appears that no one bothered to add up the cumulative dose of mercury that children would receive from the mandated vaccines.

"What took the FDA so long to do the calculations?" Peter Patriarca, director of viral products for the agency, asked in an e-mail to the CDC in 1999.

"Why didn't CDC and the advisory bodies do these calculations when they rapidly expanded the childhood immunization schedule?"

187 times EPA's limit

But by that time, the damage was done.

Infants who received all their vaccines, plus boosters, by the age of 6 months were being injected with levels of ethylmercury 187 times greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methylmercury, a related neurotoxin.

Although the vaccine industry insists that ethylmercury poses little danger because it breaks down rapidly and is removed by the body, several studies — including one published in April by the National Institutes of Health — suggest that ethylmercury is actually more toxic to developing brains and stays in the brain longer than methylmercury.

Officials responsible for childhood immunizations insist that the additional vaccines were necessary to protect infants from disease and that thimerosal is still essential in developing nations, which, they often claim, cannot afford the single-dose vials that don't require a preservative.

Dr. Paul Offit, one of CDC's top vaccine advisors, told me:

"I think if we really have an influenza pandemic — and certainly we will in the next 20 years, because we always do — there's no way on God's earth that we immunize 280 million people with single-dose vials.

But while public-health officials may have been well-intentioned, many of those on the CDC advisory committee who backed the additional vaccines had close ties to the industry.

Dr. Sam Katz, the committee's chair, was a paid consultant for most of the major vaccine makers and shares a patent on a measles vaccine with Merck, which also manufactures the hepatitis B vaccine.

Dr. Neal Halsey, another committee member, worked as a researcher for the vaccine companies and received honoraria from Abbott Labs for his research on the hepatitis B vaccine.

Indeed, in the tight circle of scientists who work on vaccines, such conflicts of interest are common.

Rep. Burton says that the CDC "routinely allows scientists with blatant conflicts of interest to serve on intellectual advisory committees that make recommendations on new vaccines," even though they have "interests in the products and companies for which they are supposed to be providing unbiased oversight."

The House Government Reform Committee discovered that four of the eight CDC advisors who approved guidelines for a rotavirus vaccine laced with thimerosal "had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine."

Would make money if his vote to approve it leads to marketable product

Offit, who shares a patent on the vaccine, acknowledged to me that he "would make money" if his vote to approve it eventually leads to a marketable product.

But he dismissed my suggestion that a scientist's direct financial stake in CDC approval might bias his judgment.

"It provides no conflict for me," he insists.

"I have simply been informed by the process, not corrupted by it.

When I sat around that table, my sole intent was trying to make recommendations that best benefited the children in this country.

It's offensive to say that physicians and public-health people are in the pocket of industry and thus are making decisions that they know are unsafe for children.

It's just not the way it works."

Other vaccine scientists and regulators gave me similar assurances.

Like Offit, they view themselves as enlightened guardians of children's health, proud of their "partnerships" with pharmaceutical companies, immune to the seductions of personal profit, besieged by irrational activists whose anti-vaccine campaigns are endangering children's health.

They are often resentful of questioning.

"Science," says Offit, "is best left to scientists."

Still, some government officials were alarmed by the apparent conflicts of interest.

In his e-mail to CDC administrators in 1999, Paul Patriarca of the FDA blasted federal regulators for failing to adequately scrutinize the danger posed by the added baby vaccines.

"I'm not sure there will be an easy way out of the potential perception that the FDA, CDC and immunization-policy bodies may have been asleep at the switch re: thimerosal until now," Patriarca wrote.

The close ties between regulatory officials and the pharmaceutical industry, he added, "will also raise questions about various advisory bodies regarding aggressive recommendations for use" of thimerosal in child vaccines.

If federal regulators and government scientists failed to grasp the potential risks of thimerosal over the years, no one could claim ignorance after the secret meeting at Simpsonwood.

But rather than conduct more studies to test the link to autism and other forms of brain damage, the CDC placed politics over science.

The agency turned its database on childhood vaccines — which had been developed largely at taxpayer expense — over to a private agency, America's Health Insurance Plans, ensuring that it could not be used for additional research.

It also instructed the Institute of Medicine, an advisory organization that is part of the National Academy of Sciences, to produce a study debunking the link between thimerosal and brain disorders.

The CDC "wants us to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe," Dr. Marie McCormick, who chaired the IOM's Immunization Safety Review Committee, told her fellow researchers when they first met in January 2001.

"We are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect" of thimerosal exposure."

According to transcripts of the meeting, the committee's chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that the IOM would conclude that the evidence was "inadequate to accept or reject a causal relation" between thimerosal and autism.

Walt wants

That, she added, was the result "Walt wants" — a reference to Dr. Walter Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC.

For those who had devoted their lives to promoting vaccination, the revelations about thimerosal threatened to undermine everything they had worked for.

"We've got a dragon by the tail here," said Dr. Michael Kaback, another committee member.

"The more negative that [our] presentation is, the less likely people are to use vaccination, immunization — and we know what the results of that will be.

We are kind of caught in a trap.

How we work our way out of the trap, I think is the charge."

Even in public, federal officials made it clear that their primary goal in studying thimerosal was to dispel doubts about vaccines.

"Four current studies are taking place to rule out the proposed link between autism and thimerosal," Dr. Gordon Douglas, then-director of strategic planning for vaccine research at the National Institutes of Health, assured a Princeton University gathering in May 2001.

"In order to undo the harmful effects of research claiming to link the [measles] vaccine to an elevated risk of autism, we need to conduct and publicize additional studies to assure parents of safety."

Formerly served as president of vaccinations for Merck, where ignored warnings about thimerosal's risks

Douglas formerly served as president of vaccinations for Merck, where he ignored warnings about thimerosal's risks.

In May of last year, the Institute of Medicine issued its final report.

Its conclusion: There is no proven link between autism and thimerosal in vaccines.

Rather than reviewing the large body of literature describing the toxicity of thimerosal, the report relied on four disastrously flawed epidemiological studies examining European countries, where children received much smaller doses of thimerosal than American kids.

It also cited a new version of the Verstraeten study, published in the journal Pediatrics, that had been reworked to reduce the link between thimerosal and autism.

The new study included children too young to have been diagnosed with autism and overlooked others who showed signs of the disease.

No further research to be conducted

The IOM declared the case closed and — in a startling position for a scientific body — recommended that no further research be conducted.

The report may have satisfied the CDC, but it convinced no one.

Rep. David Weldon, a Republican physician from Florida who serves on the House Government Reform Committee, attacked the Institute of Medicine, saying it relied on a handful of studies that were "fatally flawed" by "poor design" and failed to represent "all the available scientific and medical research."

CDC officials are not interested in an honest search for the truth, Weldon told me, because "an association between vaccines and autism would force them to admit that their policies irreparably damaged thousands of children. Who would want to make that conclusion about themselves?"

Under pressure from Congress, parents and a few of its own panel members, the Institute of Medicine reluctantly convened a second panel to review the findings of the first.

In February, the new panel, composed of different scientists, criticized the earlier panel for its lack of transparency and urged the CDC to make its vaccine database available to the public.

So far, though, only two scientists have managed to gain access.

Dr. Mark Geier, president of the Genetics Center of America, and his son, David, spent a year battling to obtain the medical records from the CDC.

Since August 2002, when members of Congress pressured the agency to turn over the data, the Geiers have completed six studies that demonstrate a powerful correlation between thimerosal and neurological damage in children.

One study, which compares the cumulative dose of mercury received by children born between 1981 and 1985 with those born between 1990 and 1996, found a "very significant relationship" between autism and vaccines.

Another study of educational performance found that kids who received higher doses of thimerosal in vaccines were nearly three times as likely to be diagnosed with autism and more than three times as likely to suffer from speech disorders and mental retardation.

Another soon-to-be-published study shows that autism rates are in decline following the recent elimination of thimerosal from most vaccines.

As the federal government worked to prevent scientists from studying vaccines, others have stepped in to study the link to autism.

Iraq orphans in a new facility in Baghdad, Iraq, Thursday, June 21, 2007.

These orphans were among 24 severely malnourished children found tied to their beds and too weak to stand.

US puppet government Iraq Labor and Social Affairs Minister Mahmoud Mohammed al-Radhi criticized publicity surrounding the boys and said news reports about the case were inaccurate.

In April, reporter Dan Olmsted of UPI undertook one of the more interesting studies himself.

Searching for children who had not been exposed to mercury in vaccines — the kind of population that scientists typically use as a "control" in experiments — Olmsted scoured the Amish of Lancaster County, Penn., who refuse to immunize their infants.

Given the national rate of autism, Olmsted calculated that there should be 130 autistics among the Amish.

He found only four.

One had been exposed to high levels of mercury from a power plant.

The other three — including one child adopted from outside the Amish community — had received their vaccines.

At the state level, many officials have also conducted in-depth reviews of thimerosal.

While the Institute of Medicine was busy whitewashing the risks, the Iowa Legislature was carefully combing through all of the available scientific and biological data.

"After three years of review, I became convinced there was sufficient credible research to show a link between mercury and the increased incidences in autism," says state Sen. Ken Veenstra, a Republican who oversaw the investigation.

"The fact that Iowa's 700 percent increase in autism began in the 1990s, right after more and more vaccines were added to the children's vaccine schedules, is solid evidence alone."

Last year, Iowa became the first state to ban mercury in vaccines, followed by California.

Similar bans are now under consideration in 32 other states.

But instead of following suit, the FDA continues to allow manufacturers to include thimerosal in scores of over-the-counter medications as well as steroids and injected collagen.

Even more alarming, the government continues to ship vaccines preserved with thimerosal to developing countries — some of which are now experiencing a sudden explosion in autism rates.

China now 1.8 million autistics

In China, where the disease was virtually unknown prior to the introduction of thimerosal by U.S. drug manufacturers in 1999, news reports indicate that there are now more than 1.8 million autistics.

Although reliable numbers are hard to come by, autistic disorders also appear to be soaring in India, Argentina, Nicaragua and other developing countries that are now using thimerosal-laced vaccines.

WHO continues to insist thimerosal safe

The World Health Organization continues to insist thimerosal is safe, but it promises to keep the possibility that it is linked to neurological disorders "under review."

I devoted time to study this issue because I believe that this is a moral crisis that must be addressed.

If, as the evidence suggests, our public-health authorities knowingly allowed the pharmaceutical industry to poison an entire generation of American children, their actions arguably constitute one of the biggest scandals in the annals of American medicine.

"The CDC is guilty of incompetence and gross negligence," says Mark Blaxill, vice president of Safe Minds, a nonprofit organization concerned about the role of mercury in medicines.

It's hard to calculate the damage to our country — and to the international efforts to eradicate epidemic diseases — if Third World nations come to believe that America's most heralded foreign-aid initiative is poisoning their children.

It's not difficult to predict how this scenario will be interpreted by America's enemies abroad.

The scientists and researchers — many of them sincere, even idealistic — who are participating in efforts to hide the science on thimerosal claim that they are trying to advance the lofty goal of protecting children in developing nations from disease pandemics.

They are badly misguided.

Their failure to come clean on thimerosal will come back horribly to haunt our country and the world's poorest populations.

Harry Potter shopping

African Children's Choir

(left)

Children grab copies of a Harry Potter book minutes after it went on sale in Berlin in 2005.

(right)

Members of the African Children's Choir sit onstage at the launch of the ONE Vote '08 effort to mobilize political action against world poverty by the anti-poverty ONE Campaign at a church on Capitol Hill in Washington, June 11, 2007.

A ccording to officials in the nation's regulatory agencies, the main obstacle to proving or disproving a link between the autism epidemic and the mercury-based preservative, thimerosal, that was contained in childhood vaccines until a few years ago, and is still in flu vaccines, has been the inability to find a large enough group of people who have never been vaccinated to compare with people who have.

In fact, a few months ago, CDC officials claimed that such a study would be nearly impossible.

On July 19, 2005, the CDC held a Media Briefing on the topic of vaccines and child health.

On the issue of government research on autism, a reporter asked CDC Director, Dr Julie Gerberding: "are you putting any money into clinical studies rather than epidemiological studies, to verify or disprove the parents' claim about a particular channel, a particular mechanism by which a minority of genetically suspectable kids are supposed damaged?"

Gerberding replied: To do the study that you're suggesting, looking for an association between thimerosal and autism in a prospective sense is just about impossible to do right now because we don't have those vaccines in use in this country so we're not in a position where we can compare the children who have received them directly to the children who don't.

Dr Duane Alexander, of the National Institute of Health, agreed and said: It's really not possible ... in this country to do a prospective study now of thimerosal and vaccines in relationship to autism.

Only a retrospective study which would be very difficult to do under the circumstances could be mounted with regard to the thimerosal question.

Never seen an Amish person with autism

However, Dan Olmsted, investigative reporter for United Press International, and author of the Age of Autism series of reports, appears to have solved this problem when he came up with the idea of checking out the nation's Amish population where parents do not ordinarily vaccinate children.

First he looked to the Amish community in Pennsylvania and found a family doctor in Lancaster who had treated thousands of Amish patients over a quarter-century who said he has never seen an Amish person with autism, according to Age of Autism: A glimpse of the Amish on June 2, 2005.

Olmsted also interviewed Dick Warner, who has a water purification and natural health business and has been in Amish households all over the country. "I've been working with Amish people since 1980," Warner said.

"I have never seen an autistic Amish child — not one," he told Olmsted. "I would know it. I have a strong medical background. I know what autistic people are like. I have friends who have autistic children," he added.

Olmsted did find one Amish woman in Lancaster County with an autistic child but as it turns out, the child was adopted from China and had been vaccinated.

The woman knew of two other autistic children but here again, one of those had been vaccinated.

Next Olmsted visited a medical practice in Middleburg, Indiana, the heart of the Amish community, and asked whether the clinic treated Amish people with autism.

A staff member told Olmsted that she had never thought about it before, but in the five years that she had worked at the clinic she had never seen one autistic Amish.

On June 8, 2005, Olmsted reported on the autism rate in the Amish community around Middlefield, Ohio, which was 1 in 15,000, according to Dr Heng Wang, the medical director, at the DDC Clinic for Special Needs Children.

"So far," according to Age of Autism, "there is evidence of fewer than 10 Amish with autism; there should be several hundred if the disorder occurs among them at the same 166-1 prevalence as children born in the rest of the population."

I don't think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us who never received vaccines

In addition to the Amish, Olmsted recently discovered another large unvaccinated group.

On December 7, 2005, Age of Autism reported that thousands of children cared for by Homefirst Health Services in metropolitan Chicago have at least two things in common with Amish children, they have never been vaccinated and they don't have autism.

Homefirst has five offices in the Chicago area and a total of six doctors.

"We have about 30,000 or 35,000 children that we've taken care of over the years, and I don't think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us who never received vaccines," said Dr Mayer Eisenstein, Homefirst's medical director who founded the practice in 1973.

Olmsted reports that the autism rate in Illinois public schools is 38 per 10,000, according to state Education Department data.

In treating a population of 30,000 to 35,000 children, this would logically mean that Homefirst should have seen at least 120 autistic children over the years but the clinic has seen none.

It looks like the problem is finally solved.

Thanks to autism's Dick Tracy, the government now has thousands of unvaccinated people to compare to people who were vaccinated.

The poisonous public attacks on Katie Wright this week–for revealing that her autistic son Christian (grandson of NBC Chair Bob Wright), has recovered significant function after chelation treatments to remove mercury — surprised many observers unfamiliar with the acrimonious debate over the mercury-based vaccine preservative Thimerosal.

Thimerosal

But the patronizing attacks on the mothers of autistic children who have organized to oppose this brain-killing poison is one of the most persistent tactics employed by those defending Thimerosal against the barrage of scientific evidence linking it to the epidemic of pediatric neurological disorders, including autism.

Mothers routinely dismissed as irrational, hysterical

Mothers of autistics are routinely dismissed as irrational, hysterical, or as a newspaper editor told me last week, “desperate to find the reason for their children’s illnesses,” and therefore, overwrought and disconnected.

But my experience with these women is inconsistent with those patronizing assessments.

Over the past two years I’ve met or communicated with several hundred of these women.

Instead of a desperate mob of irrational hysterics, I’ve found the anti-Thimerosal activists for the most part to be calm, grounded and extraordinarily patient.

As a group, they are highly educated.

Many of them are doctors, nurses, schoolteachers, pharmacists, psychologists, Ph.D.s and other professionals.

Thimerosal-laced vaccines destroyed their children’s brains

Many of them approached the link skeptically and only through dispassionate and diligent investigation became convinced that Thimerosal-laced vaccines destroyed their children’s brains.

As a group they have sat through hundreds of meetings and scientific conferences, and studied research papers and medical tests.

They have networked with each other at meetings and on the Web.

Along the way they have stoically endured the abuse routinely heaped upon them by the vaccine industry and public health authorities and casual dismissal by reporters and editors too lazy to do their jobs.

Then his pediatrician gave him Thimerosal-laced vaccines

Many of these women tell a story virtually identical to Katie Wright’s — I have now heard or seen this grim chronology recounted hundreds of times in conversations, e-mails and letters from mothers:

At 2-1/2 years old, Christian Wright exceeded all milestones.

He had 1,000 words, was toilet-trained, and enjoyed excellent social relations with his brother and others.

Then his pediatrician gave him Thimerosal-laced vaccines.

He cried all night, developed a fever and, over the coming months, this smart, healthy child disappeared.

Christian lost the ability to speak, to interact with family members, to make eye contact or to point a finger.

He is no longer toilet trained.

He engaged in stereotypical behavior–screaming, head-banging, biting and uncontrolled aggression, and suffers continuously the agonizing pain of gastrointestinal inflammation.

After hearing that story a couple dozen times, a rational person might do some more investigation.

That’s when one encounters the overwhelming science — hundreds of research studies from dozens of countries showing the undeniable connection between mercury and Thimerosal and a wide range of neurological illnesses.

In response to the overwhelming science, CDC and the pharmaceutical industry ginned up four European studies designed to disguise the link between autism and Thimerosal.

Awful decision to allow brain-killing mercury to be injected into young children

Their purpose was to provide plausible deniability for the consequences of their awful decision to allow brain-killing mercury to be injected into our youngest children.

Those deliberately deceptive and fatally flawed studies were authored by vaccine industry consultants and paid for by Thimerosal producers and published largely in compromised journals that neglected to disclose the myriad conflicts of their authors in violation of standard peer-review ethics.

As I’ve shown elsewhere [see www.robertfkennedyjr.com ], these studies were borderline fraud, using statistical deceptions to mislead the public and regulatory community.

Amish or home-schooled kids who appear to enjoy dramatically reduced levels of autism and other neurological disorders

The CDC and IOM base their defense of Thimerosal on these flimsy studies, their own formidable reputations, and their faith that journalists won’t take the time to critically read the science.

The bureaucrats are simultaneously using their influence, energies and clout to derail, defund and suppress any scientific study that may verify the link between Thimerosal and brain disorders.

(These would include epidemiological studies comparing the records of vaccinated children with those of unvaccinated populations like the Amish or home-schooled kids who appear to enjoy dramatically reduced levels of autism and other neurological disorders.)

The federal agencies have refused to release the massive public health information accumulated in their Vaccine Safety Database (VSD) apparently to keep independent scientists from reviewing evidence that could prove the link.

They are also muzzling or blackballing scientists who want to conduct such studies.

Ironically, it is the same voices that once blamed autism on “bad parenting,” and “uninvolved” moms that are now faulting these mothers for being too involved.

Due to this campaign of obfuscation and public deception, Thimerosal-based vaccines continue to sicken millions of children around the world and potential treatments — like the chelation that benefited Christian Wright — are kept out of the hands of the mainstream doctors now treating autistic kids with less effective tools.

Like thousands of other mothers of autistic children, Katie Wright knows what sickened her child.

Her efforts to spare other families this catastrophe, deployed with a cool head and calm demeanor, are truly heroic.

Maybe it’s time we all started listening

Maybe it’s time we all started listening.

Maybe it’s time to start respecting and honoring the maternal instincts and hard work of Katie and her fellow mothers by aggressively funding the studies that might verify or dispute them.

To read more on Mercury and Thimerosal by Robert F Kennedy Jr click here

To download .pdf on Mercury and Thimerosal by Robert F Kennedy Jr right click here

COMMENTS

iolaire11 June 20th, 2007 12:10 pm

My sister is a nurse. Her son is one of those that Robert Kennedy Jr talks about, almost an identical story to Katie Wright’s. The voices of industry and compromised science drown out the voices of mothers.

When will we stop declaring that passionate, involved women are hysterical and can not make rational decisions about their children?

When will we listen to our neighbors, and weigh that as more important than the squeals of those who gain from the immeasurable pain these families endure?

When will we use common sense and stop poisoning our children?

Future.me June 20th, 2007 12:23 pm

Every story is almost identical. And everyone equally as painful. And the problem is, no one wants to stop the giant companies of America who continue to rape its own people.

Capitalism has destroyed this country and know one knows it or cares. Get rich at any cost should be the slogan for us. It’s horrible that our helpless children now suffer from the “American Corporate Machine” as well.

Also look out for the overprescribing of psychiatric meds, all highly toxic, hardly tested on children, and widely prescribed to younger and younger kids, often in totally untested combinations. Check www.breggin.com/

luckylefty June 20th, 2007 12:32 pm

I leave you with a question: What would your world look like if corporations were prohibited from participating in our politics at any level: State, Local, or Federal?

Their participation is based in a LIE. We need only remove the chains from our wrists.

Peace.

To read more on Mercury and Thimerosal by Robert F Kennedy Jr click here

To download .pdf on Mercury and Thimerosal by Robert F Kennedy Jr right click here

The United States last month blocked attempts to launch formal talks on a global treaty to ban mercury which has been linked to serious ailments in pregnant women and children.

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS — Mercury released primarily from coal-fired power plants may be contributing to an increase in the number of cases of autism, a Texas researcher said on Wednesday.

A study to be published on Thursday in the journal "Health and Place" found that autism, a developmental disorder marked by communication and social interaction problems, increased in Texas counties as mercury emissions rose, said Claudia Miller, a family and community medicine professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.

"The main finding is that for every thousand pounds of environmentally released mercury, we saw a 17 percent increase in autism rates," she said in an interview.

About 48 tons of mercury are released into the air annually in the United States from hundreds of coal-burning plants.

The study looked at Texas county-by-county levels of mercury emissions recorded by the government and compared them to the rates of autism and special education services in 1,200 Texas school districts, Miller said.

"The study shows that there may be a very important connection between environmental exposure to mercury and the development of autism," she said in an interview.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has said it does not know how many cases of autism there are in the country or whether the number has increased, but that the issue is under study.

Some experts estimate there are 1.5 million people in the United States with autism, most of them children, and say the number of cases has risen rapidly in recent years.

"Autism has increased dramatically over the last decade or so and the reasons for that have really stumped the medical community," Miller said.

"Now we think that due to the rising exposures in pollutants like mercury, they may be at the root of some of these cases," she said.

The Bush administration this week ordered power plants to cut mercury pollution by 50 percent within 15 years, but environmentalists said the action fell short of what was needed. They have called for a 90 percent cut in mercury emissions.

"This research has implications for toxic substance regulation and prevention policies," said Raymond Palmer, an autism expert at the San Antonio school who helped in the study.

"Policies regarding toxic release of mercury and the incidence of developmental disorders should be investigated," he said.

Bangladeshi children play outside their hilltop homes in Chittagong, about 216 kilometers (135 miles) southeast of Dhaka, Bangladesh, Wednesday, June 13, 2007.

(right)

A student teaches children of construction workers at the Doon School in Dehra Dun, India, March 2, 2007.

For generations, the sons of India's elite have gone to the hills, heading to the once-quite Himalayan town of Dehra Dun, and to a small, spartan boarding school hidden behind high brick walls.

Photos: AP/Pavel Rahman, AP/Gurinder Osan

Toxin in plastics harming unborn boys

Scientists say chemicals have gender bending effect

Ian Sample, science correspondentFriday May 27, 2005

Scientists in America have found the first evidence that common chemicals used in products as diverse as cosmetics, toys, clingfilm and plastic bags may harm the development of unborn baby boys.

Researchers have long known that high levels of substances called phthalates have gender-bending effects on male animals, making them more feminine and leading to poor sperm quality and infertility.

The new study suggests that even normal levels of phthalates, which are ubiquitous, can disrupt the development of male babies' reproductive organs.

The discovery poses a huge problem for the chemical industry, which is already embroiled in a battle with the government over EU proposals on chemical safety.

Several types of phthalates, which are used to make plastics more pliable, and have been around for more than 50 years, have been banned, but many are still produced in vast quantities.

The study was carried out by scientists from centres across the US, including the University of Rochester and the National Centre for Environmental Health.

The researchers measured the levels of nine widely used phthalates in the urine of pregnant women and compared them with standard physiological measurements of their babies.

Tests showed that women with higher levels of four different phthalates were more likely to have baby boys with a range of conditions, from smaller penises and undescended testicles to a shorter perineum, the distance between the genitals and the anus.

The differences, say the authors, indicate a feminisation of the boys similar to that seen in animals exposed to the chemicals.

Shanna Swan, an obstetrician at the University of Rochester, and lead scientist on the study, said researchers must now unravel what kinds of products are most to blame.

One way that phthalates get into the bloodstream is when they seep into food from plastic packaging.

"It's going to take a while to work out which of these sources is most relevant to human exposure," she said.

Although the observed differences in body measurements were subtle, they indicate that what is generally regarded as the most ubiquitous class of chemicals is having a significant effect on newborns.

"Every aspect of male identity is altered when you see this in male animals," said Fred vom Saal, professor of reproductive biology at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Levels of aggression, parenting behaviour and even learning speeds were affected, he said.

Andreas Kortenkamp, an expert in environmental pollutants at the School of Pharmacy in London, said:

"If it's true, it's sensational.

This is the first time anyone's shown this effect in humans.

It's an indicator that something's gone seriously wrong with development in the womb and that's why it's so serious."

He added:

"These are mass chemicals.

They are used in any plastic that is pliable, whether it's clingfilm, kidney dialysis tubes, blood bags or toys.

Sorting this out is going to be an interesting challenge for industry as well as society."

The work, which is to appear in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, is due to be presented at the Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals Forum in San Diego on June 3.

Gwynne Lyons, toxics adviser to the WWF, said: "At the moment regulation of the chemicals industry is woefully inadequate."

She added:

"Right now the government is looking at how the regulation of hormone disrupting chemicals could be made more effective under new EU chemicals law, but the chemicals industry is lobbying very hard to water down this legislation.

"Political agreement on this legislation is not expected until later this year so it remains to be seen whether the UK government has the guts to stand up to industry lobbying.

Children in their First Communion attire walk over a floral carpet during a Corpus Christi procession in the northern Spanish town of Castropol June 10, 2007.

In this traditional Catholic religious celebration, the procession meanders through streets decorated with colourful floral carpets which are later walked by the children who have just celebrated their First Communion.

(right)

Young girl plays with a bear puppet in the Mister Rogers Neighborhood exhibit at the Louisiana Children's Museum in New Orleans Wednesday, June 13, 2007.

The exhibit was donated by the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh.

Photos: REUTERS/Eloy Alonso, AP/Alex Brandon

To rebel is right, to disobey is a duty, to act is necessary !

twenty

twenty

Playing Politics at Kids’ Expense

April 2005Playing Politics at Kids’ Expense Bill would insulate pharmaceutical firms from liability
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has buried a provision in the "Protecting America in the War on Terror Act" to insulate the pharmaceutical industry from liability for venal actions that may have poisoned an entire generation of Americans.

Mounting evidence suggests that Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative in children’s vaccines, may be responsible for the exponential growth of autism, attention deficit disorder, speech delays and other childhood neurological disorders now epidemic in the United States.

Prior to 1989, American infants generally received three vaccinations.

In the early 1990s, public-health officials dramatically increased the number of Thimerosal-containing vaccinations without considering the cumulative impact of the mercury load on developing brains.

Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative in children’s vaccines, may be responsible for the exponential growth of autism.

400 times current U.S. government’s safe level

In a 1991 memo, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one of the fathers of Merck’s vaccination programs, warned the president of the company’s vaccination division that 6-month-old children administered the shots on schedule would suffer mercury exposures 87 times the government safety standard (400 times the current U.S. government’s safe level).

He recommended that Thimerosal be discontinued, "especially when used on infants and children."

Additionally, one in every six children is now diagnosed with a related neurological disorder.

In 1998 the CDC’s lead Thimerosal researcher, Dr. Thomas Verstraeten, complained to his colleagues in a secret memo that, despite rerunning and rethinking the research, the links between Thimerosal and autism "just won’t go away."

Play with (the results) all you want

In 2000, CDC, FDA and pharmaceutical companies called a secret meeting to review Verstraeten’s findings.

According to transcripts, participants were alarmed about the undeniable link between the mercury preservative and autism.

Dr. Bill Weil told the group, "You can play with (the results) all you want. They are statistically significant."

Numerous animal, DNA, epidemiological and other studies point to Thimerosal as the culprit in America’s epidemic of neurological disorders.

Autistic children have been shown to have higher mercury loads than nonautistics, and there have been reports of significant improvements in some brain-injured children by removing mercury from their bodies.

Most of the symptoms of autism are similar to the symptoms of mercury poisoning.

Recently, scientists have been able to induce autism in certain mice by exposing them to Thimerosal.

In a recent study, former FDA scientist Dr. Jill James uncovered a scientific link that helps explain why Thimerosal injures some children and not others.

That study found that many autistic children are genetically deficient in their capacity to produce glutathione, an antioxidant generated in the brain that helps remove mercury from the body, a harmless difference until the child is exposed to large quantities of mercury.

Instead of demanding the immediate removal of Thimerosal from all vaccines, and making the drug industry help defray the public and private costs of caring for injured children, Frist’s bill would give the industry a free ride at public expense.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper and a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

2005 Knight Ridder
Bold headings and images - thewe.cc

Young woman Tran aged 23

Agent Orange contamination disability

Nguyen Thi Kieu Nhung aged 6holds photos of herself

Agent Orange contamination disability

(left)

Neighborhood children look through a window at Tran Thi Le Huyen, 23, sitting in a wheelchair in her family home in Danang, Vietnam on Monday, May 21, 207.

The young woman has been listed by the Vietnamese government as a victim of Agent Orange contamination.

Her family once lived near the highly contaminated Danang Airbase and her father was a driver for the US-backed south Vietnamese government during the war.

Her family receives a small stipend and her wheelchair from the government.

(right)

Nguyen Thi Kieu Nhung holds photos of herself between her badly deformed legs at her family home next to the Danang airbase in Danang, Vietnam on Monday, May 21, 2007.

The girl was born with physical deformities, including twisted limbs, a misshapen head, and protruding eyes suspected by local health officials to be caused by dioxin in the chemical defoliant Agent Orange.

The U.S. government has agreed to pay to contain the dioxin found in extremely high levels around Danang Airbase which once housed a U.S. military airbase where the defoliant Agent range was stored and loaded on to planes.

Photos: AP/David Guttenfelder

White House to End Power Plant ProbesMove Follows EPA Easing of EnforcementBy Eric PianinWashington Post Staff WriterThursday, November 6, 2003

The Bush administration confirmed yesterday that it will close pending investigations of 70 power plants suspected of violating the Clean Air Act and will consider dropping 13 other cases against utilities that were referred to the Justice Department for action, following the Environmental Protection Agency's decision in August to ease enforcement rules.

J.P. Suarez, the EPA's assistant administrator for enforcement, first disclosed the decision during a speech to agency enforcement officers in Seattle late Tuesday, and a senior EPA official confirmed it. Since the EPA issued the final rule changes this summer, government lawyers have found it increasingly difficult to prosecute existing pollution cases.

The rules in question, part of the Clean Air Act, say that plants and refineries built before 1970 generally do not have to install modern "scrubbers" during routine maintenance, but must do so if they make extensive improvements that extend the facilities' lives and increase their emissions. The new rules, likely to begin to take effect late this year, expand the definition of routine maintenance.

The administration and industry advocates say the rules changes were needed to bring more clarity and certainty to the regulatory process, and to encourage facility upgrades.

EPA and Justice Department spokesmen insisted that the government would continue to prosecute existing cases that were brought against power plants in the late 1990s under the old rules. Justice Department lawyers filed a brief Sept. 5 at the end of a trial involving a Dynegy Midwest Generation Inc. power plant in Illinois disavowing their previous definition of "routine maintenance" in light of the newly adopted rule. "As the agency has consistently stated, we are vigorously pursuing all filed cases, and we will evaluate each pending investigation on a case-by-case basis to determine whether it will be pursued or set aside," the EPA said in a statement yesterday.

But environmentalists and congressional Democrats said the decision to drop dozens of ongoing investigations confirms their suspicions that the administration is retreating in its enforcement efforts as a favor to utilities and refineries that contributed heavily to the Republicans.

"First the administration weakens our clean-air law, and now it won't enforce it," said Sen. James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.), the ranking minority member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. "Instead of fighting pollution, this administration is at war with the Clean Air Act. Innocent bystanders such as children, the elderly and the infirm will be the principal casualties."

John D. Walke, a clean-air specialist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said, "This is easily the most vile, radical and illegal enforcement stance ever taken by the EPA in its 30-plus-year history."

Eric Schaeffer, a former EPA enforcement officer who now heads the Environmental Integrity Project, said some of the investigations being dropped involve large power companies, such as Detroit Edison, which President Bush visited in September, and Reliant whose former executives are "Pioneers" who have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the president's reelection campaign.

Scott Segal, an industry spokesman with the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, said that the preamble to the new rule states that it applies only to future cases, and that "all indications are that existing filed cases . . . are being aggressively pursued by the federal government."

A decade-long study of southern Florida and the Everglades concludes that tough regulations of airborne mercury emissions have a profound and almost immediate effect in removing the toxic pollutant from the environment and the food chain.

The findings, according to some environmentalists, offer compelling evidence that government regulators can effectively and relatively swiftly address public health problems associated with mercury, a byproduct of burning coal and waste.

Mercury in water turns to methylmercury, a potent neurotoxin that can cause severe neurological and developmental damage in humans — especially small children — and that comes primarily from eating contaminated fish and shellfish.

The $40 million study by the state of Florida, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Geological Survey also adds to evidence of a link between mercury emissions — especially from incinerators and power plants — and water-quality problems that lead to toxic buildups in fish, waterfowl and other wildlife.

The report, to be released today in Tallahassee by Florida environmental officials, concludes that strict government controls of emissions can produce dramatic improvements in much less time than scientists once assumed.

The levels of mercury contaminant found in largemouth bass and other wildlife of the Everglades declined by 60 to 75 percent since state and federal agencies began waging an aggressive campaign in the early 1990s to close or modernize municipal and medical-waste incinerators that emitted mercury gases.

Industry advocates and research groups, including the Edison Electric Institute and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), contend that mercury pollution is globally ubiquitous — carried around the world by the wind — so that forcing power plants to install costly antipollution equipment would not necessarily ensure a reduction in emissions.

"EPA and EPRI research suggest that 40 to 70 percent of mercury pollution comes from outside our borders," said Dan Riedinger, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute.

"There's limits to the benefits that can be derived from greatly reducing the mercury emissions from any sector in the United States."

The Florida study is the latest entry in a national debate over whether mercury emissions should be controlled in the utility industry, which generates a third of the nation's atmospheric mercury pollution.

The EPA faces a Dec. 15 deadline for announcing a proposed rule that for the first time would control mercury and other hazardous emissions from the nation's 1,100 coal- and oil-fired power plants.

The EPA announced last year that it was considering a rule under the Clean Air Act ordering utilities to meet a "maximum achievable control technology" (MACT) standard for mercury that would require every plant that exceeds the standard to install expensive scrubbers or face penalties.

The plants would not be allowed to buy "credits" from lesser-polluting companies to meet the new targets, as they may under clean-air rules regulating acid rain.

The new MACT rule potentially could add $6 billion a year to industry's operating costs and reduce mercury pollution by as much as 90 percent by 2008 — from 48 tons a year nationwide to five tons.

The utility industry and its congressional allies have urged the administration to soften the proposed rule or delay its implementation beyond a 2007 target date.

Industry officials say they do not oppose new standards but want them drafted in a way to give the utilities flexibility to reduce emissions as new technology becomes available "without compromising reliability."

As a compromise, President Bush included provisions in his "Clear Skies" bill that would require smaller reductions of mercury pollution over a longer period of time.

The measure has stalled in Congress.

A House Science subcommittee heard expert testimony yesterday that was described by lawmakers as "compelling evidence" of the need for action on mercury.

Richard Ayres, an environmental lawyer in Washington, said the Florida study "demonstrates that reducing emissions from power plants would have almost an immediate effect on improving the environment and the public health."

Swedish researchers once thought it could take hundreds of years for mercury contamination of the environment and the food chain to abate.

A report issued last week by the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management estimated that toxic mercury emissions from power plants could be reduced by 90 percent with regulation and commercially available technology.

The Florida study determined that the vast majority of the mercury deposited in Florida's aquatic life and wildlife came directly from local or regional incinerators and plants.

"It is true there is one atmosphere, and some of the mercury comes from other sources, but the local signature is substantially greater than the mercury that comes from far away," Thomas D. Atkeson, a mercury expert and coordinator of the research, said in an interview last week.

"It is clear that to the extent you can lower the emissions of reactive mercury in your airshed, you will see the benefit in your local area — and you will see it relatively quickly."

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Davis Baltz shops for organic food and otherwise tries to live as healthy as he can.

So he was shocked to learn that the pollutants collecting inside his body sounded much like a Superfund cleanup site: pesticides, flame retardants and other nasty, man-made chemicals turned up in a recent test.

"What that told me is that no matter what I tried to do, the plumes of chemicals that we are passing in and out of everyday give us exposure," said Baltz, who works for Commonweal, an environmental group in Bolinas.

For decades, researchers have sampled the air, land and sea to measure pollution from power plants, factories and automobiles.

Now, in a process called biomonitoring, scientists are sampling urine, blood and mother's milk to catalogue the pollutants accumulating in humans.

They call the results 'body burden.'

Commonweal and the Washington-based Environmental Working Group funded tests for Baltz and eight others at $5,000 apiece.

Though the tests are yielding scary lists of contaminants found in the body, their links to disease are less clear. Nonetheless, proponents say such testing will help researchers learn what role the environment plays in causing disease and how to treat it.

Many chemicals such as PCB and DDT, both banned decades ago, remain in the environment for years and build up in the body over a lifetime.

It's not a new phenomenon. Rachel Carson wrote about the poisons in her 1962 book "Silent Spring," which is widely credited for jump-starting the environmental movement.

But until now, researchers were left mostly to guess exactly how much and how many of the toxins lingered in our bodies.

Few of the estimated 75,000 chemicals found in the United States have been tested for their health effects, Baltz and other biomonitoring proponents say.

But several studies have been completed:

— In March, California researchers reported that San Francisco-area women have three to 10 times as much chemical flame retardant in their breast tissue as European or Japanese women.

— Indiana University researchers reported at the same time that levels in Indiana and California women and infants were 20 times higher than those in Sweden and Norway, which recently banned flame retardant.

— The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this year released data from 2,500 volunteers tested for 116 pollutants and found such chemicals as mercury, uranium and cotinine, a chemical broken down from nicotine.

The CDC also reported that Mexican-American children were found to have three times the amount of a chemical derived from DDT compared with other children. Scientists suspect that Mexico and Latin American countries may still be using the banned chemical.

There's still a debate among advocates over which of the 75,000 chemicals to look for when biomonitoring. And even when chemicals are found, there's little an individual can do.

Next month, state Sen. Deborah Ortiz plans to renew calls for California's polluters to finance testing of contaminants in mother's milk.

"This will allow women to better make informed decision about their health," said Ortiz, a Democrat. "And the information will help researchers and public health officials."

But some fear that biomonitoring results could be misinterpreted and frighten new mothers from breast-feeding their babies.

"We are clearly concerned about what effects the stories of biomonitoring will have," said Barbara Brenner, executive director of the San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Action nonprofit advocacy group. "Any rational woman will say to herself, 'Should I be breast-feeding?'"

Others see political motives behind some of the tests.

"Everyone's exposed to substances and there's no evidence that the low levels people are exposed to are harming anybody," said Steven Milloy, author of "Junk Science Judo: Self Defense Against Health Scares and Scams." "It's a waste of time and money that only serves to scare
people."

Because fish can be healthful as well as hazardous, medical experts have grappled for years with what advice to give people, particularly pregnant women, about how much is safe to eat.

A new study by Harvard University doctors concludes that pregnant womencan boost their baby's intelligence by eating fish a couple of times a week, but only if they avoid varieties with large concentrations of mercury.

Fish is full of omega-3 fatty acids, which help young brains develop and seem to protect against heart disease. But it alsois tainted by mercury, a potent neurotoxin that interferes with the building of brains.

The new study of 135 Boston-area babies is considered important because it quantifies and compares the risks and benefits of a fish diet.

The researchers concluded that pregnant women should eat fish because their babies are likely to score higher on intelligence tests. But they also reported that the benefits of the nutrients disappear and the babies' intelligence scores drop substantially if the fish contains high levels of mercury.

Nearly all fish contains traces of mercury, but large marine species such as swordfish, shark and albacore tuna accumulate the highest levels.

About 630,000 babies a year are born with mercury exposure that could reduce their mental abilities, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates.

Mercury can harm adults — hampering memories, causing hair to fall out and perhaps raising the risk of heart disease — but fetuses are considered the most vulnerable because neurological effects have been found at low levels.

Dr. Philippe Grandjean, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Southern Denmark and Harvard University who has studied the effects of mercury on children for 20 years, said the new findings added to the mounting evidence that women should eat fish but follow warnings to limit the types and amounts they consume.

Previously, Grandjean and others presented similar findings for school-age children, reporting that their mental skills, particularly memory, vocabulary and attention, were reduced if they had been exposed in the womb to relatively low levels of mercury.

Grandjean, who was not involved in the latest study, said infant intelligence was highly variable so it was "surprising that the authors were able to detect both a positive effect of fish intake and an adverse effect of mercury. That would suggest that these effects [on the infants] are quite strong."

The women in the study ate fish on average once a week during the second trimester of their pregnancy. The highest intelligence scores were among the babies whose mothers had consumed more than two helpings of fish per week but whose mercurylevels remained under 1.2 parts per million, according to the report published online last month in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

For each additional weekly serving of fish, the babies' intelligence scores increased by 4 points, or an average of almost 7%. But for every increase of 1 part per million of mercury, the babies' intelligence scores dropped by 7.5 points, or 12.5%. A woman could raise her mercury level by 1 ppm if she ate an average-sized serving of swordfish once a week, said Dr. Emily Oken of Harvard Medical School, the study's lead researcher.

"The range of fish intake in our study was from zero to 5.5 servings per week, so these were not women who were eating fish daily or multiple times a day, "said Oken, who specializes in pregnancy and nutrition.

The study does not provide details about which fish or how much fish pregnant women should eat. But its findings support the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's guidelines, issued in 2004, which recommend that pregnant and nursing women and those who might become pregnant eat up to two meals, or 12 ounces, of fish a week and that they avoid certain types of fish entirely. Young children are advised to follow the same guidelines because their brains are still developing.

The FDA entirely rules out swordfish and shark as well as king mackerel and tilefish, found on the Atlantic Coast and Gulf of Mexico, for pregnant and nursing women and young children. Some white and albacore tuna, canned and fresh, also have high mercury levels. Generally, the darker the fish meat, the higher the mercury content.

Sardines, herring, canned light tuna, cod, haddock, tilapia, sea bass and shrimp are considered good, low-mercury choices. Small fatty fishes such as sardines and herring are especially beneficial to babies because they contain a lot of fatty acids.

Salmon is generally low in mercury and high in fatty acids, but some farmed salmon contains high concentrations of other contaminants, PCBs, which are also risky for babies.

In California, grocery stores and restaurants selling fish are required to post mercury warnings for women and young children. The EPA also has issued localized advisories for some species caught by recreational fishermen, particularly in the Great Lakes and the San Francisco Bay.

Despite the warnings, many pregnant women — and their doctors — are confused.

"Based on personal experience with colleagues, it seems to me that many doctors are as confused about this issue as patients are," said Oken,who practices medicine at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care in Boston.

Some women say their obstetricians do not tell them about the FDA guidelines or give them specific advice about fish. Many are unaware they should avoid swordfish and limit tuna and other fish. Others stop eating all fish during pregnancy, which means their babies do not get its brain-enhancing effects.

"Women may indiscriminately reduce fish consumption in response to concerns about mercury exposure, perhaps substituting fish with other less healthful foods," the Harvard researchers said in their report. In addition to fatty acids, fish is high in protein, iron, vitamin E, selenium and other nutrients.

Scientists disagree on how much mercury is safe. The EPA based its conclusions on studies of about 1,700 first-graders on the Faroe Islands, in the North Atlantic. However, some scientists debate the risks of fish because whale was the source of the mercury there and similar tests on children in the island nation of Seychelles found no effects related to fish.

In tests designed by neuropsychologists to study early signs of intelligence and memory, the Boston-area babies were shown photographs of new faces and ones they had been shown before, and the researchers recorded how much time they spent studying each one. Babies score higher on the test if they move quickly from the familiar face, indicating recognition, to exploring the new face.

Dr. Jane Hightower, a San Francisco internist who has detected excessive mercury levels in many of her patients,
particularly those who eat swordfish, said consumers might have to resort to omega-3 supplements to get the benefits of fish without therisks.

"The fact is we need good protein sources that are beneficial and low in saturated fat and without contaminants,"Hightower said. "If the polluting industries, the fishing industry, government officials and our political representatives cannot resolve this mercury problem in our air, water and fish, the supplement industry will be left to resolve it for the consumer."

Mercuryis a natural element found in the Earth's crust, but when released into the air through smokestacks, it spreads globally and accumulates in tissues of animals, particularly fish. Coal-fired power plants, largely in Asia, are the largest sources of man-made mercury emissions.

Someone might tell them such a life destroying decision was made years ago.

[We had been speaking of the vaccines — that this would occur with a percentage of children — part of a planned dumbing down]

Such a decision that only the truly inhumane could make.

One has to believe these perversions really are a different species.

Kewe

Tuesday, 4 November 2008

Rainfall autism theory suggested

Increased rainfall, or something linked to it, may be connected to the development of autism, scientists say.

Autism rates have risen significantly

The theory is based on child health and weather records from three US states, but has been greeted cautiously by a UK research charity.

The US study found autism rates were higher among children whose states experienced higher rainfall in their first three years.

The work appears in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

The rising rates of autism - up, by some measures, from one in 2,500 to one in 150, has been attributed mainly to improvements in the way doctors are able to recognise the disease.

However, scientists from Cornell University say this does not exclude a factor which may be independently increasing the number of children growing up with the condition.

They calculated average annual rainfall for California, Oregon and Washington State between 1987 and 1999, then looked at autism prevalence rates in the children growing up during this period.

In recent years autism

has been linked to factors

as varied as older aged

fathers, early television

viewing, vaccines, food

allergies, heavy metal

poisoning and wireless

technology to name just a few

Mark Lever
National Autistic Society

They found that rates could be linked to that amount of precipitation in their state between these dates.

They added: "Autism prevalence was higher for birth cohorts that experienced relatively heavy precipitation when they were younger than three years."

The reason for the link, if it exists, might not be directly related to rainfall, although the scientists said it was possible that the process of rainfall might affect the chemicals to which children were exposed.

Indoor theory

They also suggested that being forced to stay indoors for longer periods could affect development, perhaps by increased exposure to television, or to household chemicals, or even through a lack of vitamin D, produced by being out in sun.

However, they made it clear that none of these was more than a theory, and called for further research to see if the link was a real one.

Mark Lever, chief executive of The National Autistic Society said the latest theory would join a succession of others advanced about the condition and its origins.

He said: "In recent years autism has been linked to factors as varied as older aged fathers, early television viewing, vaccines, food allergies, heavy metal poisoning, and wireless technology, to name just a few.

"Some of these theories are little more than conjecture or have been discredited, others seem more promising and are in need of further study. As yet, however, very few have been substantiated by scientific research."

He said: "We don't yet understand what causes autism, although scientists do believe that genetic factors might play a part.

"People with autism and their families are naturally concerned to get the right information and there is a lot of confusion and concern over the conflicting theories put forward."

MMVIII

One more example that the BBC has serious problems with many of their reports

Let's give them a little help by doing a two minute Google to find this:

And the system doesn't want you to know about vaccines and autism and that so many children become autistic after multiple vaccinations especially one multiple vaccine that takes place around 18 months

Nearly 1.3 million more people fell below the official poverty level in 2002, swelling the number of poor in the US to nearly 35 million, according to a September report from the Census Bureau.

The results of the American Community Survey (ACS) indicate that the recession hit the hardest among children and their families.

Current policy concerning support for the poor harks back to the bitter days of early capitalism and capital accumulation in Britain, when the rising bourgeoisie demanded the removal of all fetters on capitalist profits, including supports for the poor.

Today, low-income families have been demonized, with the US Congress now demanding that single mothers on welfare be forced to work 40 hours a week, rather than the current requirement of 30, in order to receive any income.

Most states have given up any guarantee of cash aid to childless adults even as rising unemployment is rendering families penniless that until recently had been considered “middle class.”

Record numbers of jobless are being turned down for unemployment benefits.

Low wages and part-time work, along with tightened eligibility requirements, are used by state and federal agencies to deny benefits to the lowest-income workers.

Laid-off workers who do get unemployment benefits are exhausting them without finding a new job at rates not seen since the Great Depression.

The US Congress is expected to grant another $87 billion for the predatory wars in Iraq and Afghanistan demanded by the Bush administration for the next year alone.

Yet, members of the US House and Senate are deadlocked over whether the federal government will increase the miserably inadequate funding for child care for low-income families by $1 billion or $5 billion over the next five years.

According to last year’s Census Bureau Current Population Survey (CPS), poverty began to climb again in 2001, after declining from as high as 15 percent in the 1980s, to 11.3 percent.

www.wsws.org By Debra Watson 13 September 2003

Unprecedented inequality

The centerpiece of the Bush administration’s budget is its $670 billion tax cut, largely targeted to the wealthy.

While there are a few provisions in the tax package that spread benefits more widely, such as the increase in the child tax credit to $1,000, the bulk of the tax cut is narrowly focused on the wealthiest Americans.

Of the total of $670 billion in cuts, $364 billion, more than half, arises from the elimination of taxation on most corporate dividends.

Another $236 billion in the Bush plan comes from accelerating the tax cuts that were adopted in 2001 and scheduled to be phased in gradually over the next seven years.

These include cuts in income tax rates and inheritance taxes that, again, largely benefit the rich.

The actual cost of this second round of Bush tax cuts is likely to be far higher than the government’s $670 billion figure.

According to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the tax cuts announced, proposed or envisioned by the Bush administration will cost $2.3 trillion in federal revenues over the next 10 years.

My opinion is that a mixed combination, depending upon the child, of Vitamin D deficiency and mercury and other toxic substances given in vaccines, has seen autism and related increase to the level that it has.

Kewe

The high rate of natural production of vitamin D3 cholecalciferol in the skin is the single most important fact every person should know about vitamin D — a fact that has profound implications for the natural human condition.

Technically not a 'vitamin,' vitamin D is in a class by itself.

Its metabolic product, calcitriol, is actually a secosteroid hormone that targets over 2000 genes (about 10% of the human genome) in the human body.

Current research has implicated vitamin D deficiency as a major factor in the pathology of at least 17 varieties of cancer as well as heart disease, stroke, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, depression, chronic pain, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, muscle wasting, birth defects, periodontal disease, and more.

Over the past eight years I have been taking d3 which is lanolin, refined sheep fat, treated with sun rays.

I take 20,000 IU's per hour if a cold or flu-like symptom occurs, until sleep.

Usually in the morning cold and flu symptoms are gone, but if they are still present or return during the day I take 20,000 IU's per hour, 2 x 10,000 IU capsules again until sleep or until the symptoms go away.

I reckon one 10,000 IU small capsule of d3 is about 15 minutes in the sun.

Somehow people don't seem to be out enough in the sun.

D3 has many other benefits to the body as the value of being in the sun effects every aspect of health integration.

I take C and E, a multiple vitamin/mineral, iodine and trace minerals and varied herbs including Turmeric and Curcumin (for oral hygiene and other reasons) but D3 I have found can be used in an over-the-counter medication fashion.

I have a high quantity of fruit and vegetables in my diet.

When I am not experiencing any cold or flu symptoms, which is most of the time, I take 10,000 IU or 20,000 IU per day

I do not take any other medication because for me personally I have not found I need any.

400 IU of D3 is 1µG  this ratio only applies to D3, different ratios apply to other products.

Again this is not medical advise  I am not a doctor  it is merely stating how I have lived my life and live my life.

Kewe  TheWE.cc

An in-depth highly recommended presentation on YouTube video by Gabriele Stähler in discussion with Bill Ryan on the benefits of Vitamin D3